"We've got a major problem in our culture, as it relates to the Internet and pornography and child pornography"
About this Quote
A blunt pileup of nouns is the point here: Internet, pornography, child pornography. Ashcroft isn’t arguing a case so much as building a moral staircase where each step feels more alarming than the last. By yoking the broad (the Internet) to the widely contested (pornography) and then to the universally condemned (child pornography), he compresses a complicated cultural and legal landscape into a single, escalating threat. The rhetorical move is diagnostic: treat the medium itself as suspect, imply a slippery progression, and make dissent feel like softening on the worst crime in the chain.
The phrase “major problem in our culture” is doing heavy work. It’s a culture-war frame, not a narrow law-enforcement one. “Our” pulls the listener into a shared community under siege; “culture” expands the target from specific offenders to social norms, technology companies, and permissive attitudes. That breadth grants political permission for broad tools: surveillance, aggressive prosecution, content regulation, and public shaming. It also shifts the debate from evidence to values, where Ashcroft was most comfortable.
Context matters: Ashcroft’s tenure as attorney general sat at the intersection of post-9/11 security logic and a longstanding conservative campaign against sexual “decadence.” The line reads like an attempt to fuse those instincts into one mandate: protect the nation by policing its screens. It’s effective because it’s hard to argue with the endpoint while the path there remains strategically vague, letting policy scope expand under the cover of consensus outrage.
The phrase “major problem in our culture” is doing heavy work. It’s a culture-war frame, not a narrow law-enforcement one. “Our” pulls the listener into a shared community under siege; “culture” expands the target from specific offenders to social norms, technology companies, and permissive attitudes. That breadth grants political permission for broad tools: surveillance, aggressive prosecution, content regulation, and public shaming. It also shifts the debate from evidence to values, where Ashcroft was most comfortable.
Context matters: Ashcroft’s tenure as attorney general sat at the intersection of post-9/11 security logic and a longstanding conservative campaign against sexual “decadence.” The line reads like an attempt to fuse those instincts into one mandate: protect the nation by policing its screens. It’s effective because it’s hard to argue with the endpoint while the path there remains strategically vague, letting policy scope expand under the cover of consensus outrage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|
More Quotes by John
Add to List
